The Short Story Archives - Page 21 of 31

The Evening Party

November 21, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Evening Party appears to have been written in the early 1920s, around the time of Virginia Woolf’s other experimental short stories. In her introduction to The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf Susan Dick points out that the story appeared in the collection of sketches that was given the title Cracked Fiddles, though it is not clear if this was ever published or not.

Queen Anne’s Gate – Westminster

The Evening Party – critical commentary

This story has similar features to the other early pieces in the Mrs Dalloway’s Party sequence. The setting is clearly a social gathering in central London, with guests arriving in formal evening dress. The principal characters – the narrator and her companion – are imaginatively detached from the event, and their interchanges are interrupted by people wishing to make social ‘introductions’. These features occur in many of the other early stories – from Phyllis and Rosamond to A Summing Up. The implication is that whilst social interaction is superficial and fellow guests are likely to be boring, there is a rich alternative in the inner life of the imagination.

The technical experimentation in the story comes from Woolf’s clever blending of interior monologue with a first person narrative which becomes a variation on the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique.

Ah, but let us wait a little! — The moon is up; the sky open; and there, rising in a mound against the sky with trees upon it, is the earth. The flowing silvery clouds look down upon Atlantic waves. The wind blows soft round the corner of the street, lifting my cloak, holding it gently in the air and then letting it sink and droop as the sea now swells and brims over the rocks and again withdraws.

At first reading it is not clear from whose point of view the story is being narrated, who is being addressed in the use of ‘us’, or where the events are located – on the Atlantic or in a street. In fact Woolf is presenting two ‘locations’ at the same time – one imagined and the other actual.

It was in these experimental fictions that Woolf devised, as Susan Dick observes, “a way to place her narrator within her character’s mind and to present that character’s thoughts and emotions as they occur”. However, it has to be said that her technique of mingling poetic imagery with practical narrative is more convincing in the non-conversational parts of the story than in the verbal ‘exchanges’ that take place between the characters. In a work of this kind it is simply not possible to believe that one character would say to another – “Don’t you see the pond through the Professor’s head? Don’t you see the swan swimming through Mary’s skirt?” – although it also has to be admitted that Woolf did bring this technique into the realms of the credible by the time she wrote The Waves (1931).

But she is successful in expressing via more credible dialogue an early version of her notion of ‘moments of being’. These are the brief and particular moments of time during which individuals can experience a sense of wholeness or completeness, a sense of being in harmony either with themselves or with the world around them, or they might feel that a significant truth is revealed to them, by accident almost, via the events of everyday life. The narrator here addresses her companion:

‘Don’t you remember in early childhood, when, in play or talk, as one stepped across the puddle or reached the window on the landing, some imperceptible shock froze the universe to a solid ball of crystal which one held for a moment — I have some mystical belief that all time past and future too, the tears and powdered ashes of generations clotted to a ball; then we were absolute and entire; nothing then was excluded; that was certainty — happiness.

Very characteristically however, Woolf immediately goes on to demolish this mystical vision of ‘completeness’ or ‘knowledge’ in the very next sentence: ‘See what comes of trying to say what one means! Nonsense!’ This is very similar to the way she undercuts her own imaginative inventions in stories such as The Mark on the Wall and An Unwritten Novel.

The Evening Party – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Evening Party – plot summary

The story begins with an un-named narrator conjouring poetic imagery out of the surroundings and her imagination. The setting appears to be evening in a city, where the narrator and her companion arrive at a party along with other guests.

The two of them exchange fanciful imagery – one composed of visual and the other of literary impressions. They then exchange observations with a professor, first about Shelley’s use of punctuation, then about classic literature. When he leaves, they go on to discuss ‘moments of being’ and the limitations of speech to arrive at an understanding of the world.

The party hostess interrupts them to introduce the narrator to a Mr Nevill, who admires her writing. They discuss the value of dead authors – and Shakespeare in particular, their enthusiasm for whom dissolves into an exchange of fanciful poetic images. This conversation is interrupted by a woman called Helen who introduces her to someone who knew her as a child.

The narrator rejoins her companion, and after exchanging further fragmentary observations about the party and the night, they agree to leave, hand in hand.

Virginia Woolf podcast

A eulogy to words

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Between the Acts (1941) is her last novel, in which she returns to a less demanding literary style. Despite being written immediately before her suicide, she combines a playful wittiness with her satirical critique of English upper middle-class life. The story is set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village fete at Pointz Hall. It describes a country pageant on English history written by Miss La Trobe, and its effects on the people who watch it. Most of the audience misunderstand it in various ways, but the implication is that it is a work of art which temporarily creates order amidst the chaos of human life. There’s lots of social comedy, some amusing reflections on English weather, and meteorological metaphors and imagery run cleverly throughout the book.
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The Complete Shorter Fiction contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is one for connoisseurs – well presented and edited in a scholarly manner.
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Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
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Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – short stories
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works

The Fight

April 11, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Fight first appeared in September 1925 in the Russian emigré newspaper Rul’ published in Berlin. The paper had been established by Vladimir Nabokov’s father in 1921. Its first publication in English translation was in The New Yorker for February 1985.

In his list of stories collected for publication in single volume form, Nabokov listed The Fight under the heading ‘Bottom of the Barrel’, but it was included in the Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1995. It also seems to me no less worthy than many of the other shorter and lighter pieces from the early period of his output as a writer.

Vladimir Nabokov

The Fight – critical commentary

This is one of a number of stories set in Berlin which combines detailed observations of everyday life with a curious sense of emotional detachment. Nabokov had spent the years 1919 to 1923 as a student at Trinity College Cambridge and then settled in Berlin as the first major centre of Russian emigration. He earned a precarious living teaching English, giving tennis lessons, and working as a walk-on extra in the film industry.

It’s almost as if he was reassuring himself that the appreciation of aesthetic phenomena was a bulwark against the existential despair which engulfed so many of his uprooted fellow countrymen. But the story is also an early example of two literary features which Nabokov returned to again and again throughout his career – reflections on aesthetic pleasure and self-referentiality in fiction.

The narrator first of all quits the scene of the conflict before it is ended:

I neither know nor wish to know who was wrong and who was right in this affair. The story could have been given a different twist, and made to depict compassionately how a girl’s happiness had been mortified for the sake of a copper coin

So – after a conventional account of events, Nabokov suddenly breaks the unspoken contract with his readers and has his narrator reveal himself as conscious of creating a fictional narrative. This is fiction reflecting upon itself – but he goes on to offer an alternative subject matter in the form of the specific and momentary effects available in the details of everyday life:

Or perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all, but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled on this particular day, at this particular moment, in a unique and inimitable way.

The Fight – study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – 1967 interview, with jokes and put-downs

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of photographs

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

The Fight – plot summary

An un-named narrator is living in Berlin. In the heat of summer he goes each day to bathe in a nearby lake. There he sees an elderly German man who is also a daily visitor. When he goes for a drink in the evening, the man turns out to be Krause, the keeper of a tavern who works there with his daughter Emma.

The narrator becomes a regular visitor to the tavern and realises that one of the other customers is Emma’s lover. When the lover helps himself to a drink at the bar and tries to leave without paying, Krause follows him into the street and a fight breaks out. The narrator watches the two men brawling for a while, then goes back into the tavern to retrieve his hat, comforts Emma, then leaves without knowing the outcome of the conflict. Instead he reflects on a number of different number of ways the story might have ended.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
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Collected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
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More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

The Figure in the Carpet

January 10, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Figure in the Carpet (1896) is one of a number of stories James wrote in his later years which deal with issues of authorship, writing, and literary reputation. The tale has baffled critics ever since it first appeared. Some commentators claim that it’s a satire of literary criticism, others that it’s no more than a literary joke, and just a few readers claim that it is a profound exploration of literary hermeneutics – which is ‘the study of the interpretation of written texts’.

The Figure in the Carpet

The Figure in the Carpet – critical commentary

The question of interpretation

It is generally agreed that The Figure in the Carpet is one of James’s more baffling stories. We naturally would like to know exactly what ‘secrets’ Vereker has embedded in his work, just as the narrator would. But he is thwarted in that hope, and so are we.

It’s possible to see the tale as a critique of literary criticism – since that is the narrator’s occupation. He sees Vereker’s work as a means of advancing his own reputation as a critic, and he views his friend Corvick and the latecomer Drayton Deane as threatening rivals.

In this approach to reading the story, James is taking revenge on lazy literary critics who are not prepared to study an author’s work in sufficient depth, but are only interested in advancing their own celebrity and careers. The narrator spends most of his efforts trying to extract the ‘secret’ from other people, instead of doing the work himself. At the end of the story he is no wiser, and the implication of this reading is that the literary joke is on him. This view can be supported by the initial ideas James recorded for the tale in his notebooks:

the lively impulse, at the root of it, to reinstate analytic appreciation, by some ironic or fantastic stroke, so far as possible, in its virtually forfeited rights and dignities.

In fact the ‘literary hoax’ interpretation could be taken even further if we posit the notion that Vereker, as an intelligent novelist, actually invents the idea of a hidden meaning in his work in order to tease the narrator.

The literary joke

Vereker makes an eloquent claim for the hidden meaning in his work, but he refuses to say what it is. The remainder of the story is focused on the narrator’s fruitless search for an answer to the mystery. This reading of the story sees the narrator as a gullible dupe.

First we might observe that Vereker’s claim is itself a fictional construct. There is no way a reader can know if it is true or not – because we have no examples of Vereker’s work with which to form a judgement. Covington’s subsequent claim to have discovered the secret is also part of the fiction. His word too is something whose veracity cannot be checked – even though the events of the text include Vereker’s apparent endorsement of Covington’s claim. The fact that two fictional characters might agree on the existence of a ‘secret meaning’ does not mean that such a meaning exists.

Those who wish to see the story as a literary joke might also observe that having apparently established the discovery of the hidden secret, the narrator is then tantalised, to an almost ridiculous extent, by his failure to drag the secret from the hands of those claiming to have grasped it.

In fact the very three people who claim to know the answer to the mystery (Vereker, Covington, and Gwendolen) all die in rapid succession, just as the narrator thinks he might learn the secret from them. He is left at the end of the story staring into the void, having also infected the hapless Drayton Deane with his belief in the mystery..

The face value interpretation

It is also possible to take the fictional claims made in the story at face value. Vereker claims his work has an ‘exquisite scheme’, but refuses to reveal it; and Covington claims to have discovered the secret, but dies before explaining what it is.

If we take this to be true, the story becomes a psychological study in the Narrator’s self-regard and egotism, which blinds him to the nature of events and the people with whom he is concerned.

Vereker warns him not to go off in pursuit of the ‘buried treasure’ in his work – “Give it up, give it up!” – to which the narrator responds by accusing him of being ‘a man of unstable moods’. If we follow the narrator’s comments closely, he reveals himself as a dubious judge who is also full of self-congratulation.

When Covington at first fails to uncover the ‘figure in the carpet’ the narrator observes ‘I considered I showed magnanimity in not reproaching him’. And when Covington goes to visit Vereker, he comments ‘We pictured the whole scene at Rapollo, where he would have written , mentioning my name, for permission to call’.

After spending more time with Gwendolen both before and after Covington’s death, he finds her much improved, ‘showing, I thought the better company she had kept’ (which can only be a reference to himself). Finally, he quite cynically contemplates the idea of marrying her just in the hope of gaining access to the mystery, which he thinks might be transmitted naturally enough from husband to wife. But he is so far detached from the emotional sphere of human relations, he speculates on Covington revealing the literary mystery to Gwendolen, and wonders ‘For what else but that ceremony had the nuptials taken place?’.

The narrator is left at the end of the story with no resolution to the mystery, and more importantly no further insight into himself and the limitations of his sensibility. This is a satirical version of the outcome of stories such as The Beast in the Jungle in which a narrator blinded by egoism realises that his life has been futile.

Story or tale?

Very few of James’s stories are short by modern standards, and the fact is that he called them tales, not stories. But as short fictions, they are usually judged by the same criteria as most stories – from Edgar Allen Poe to Maupassant, Checkhov, Joyce, and Woolf.

Poe suggested that a short story is something that can be read at one sitting, and that all its interest is focused onto a single issue. To these unities there have since been added unity of theme, time, imagery, place, character. In other words, short stories are at their best when they are as concentrated and unified as possible.

It could be argued that The Figure in the Carpet certainly focuses attention on one issue – the pursuit of a mystery – and has one principal character – the narrator. But these features are overwhelmed by something of a superfluity of incident. The story contains two marriages and no less than four deaths, on all of which the narrative depends – which is too much for even a short tale to bear.

It also has a singular lack of geographic unity. The story moves from London to Bombay, then on to Munich, Rapallo, and Meran before returning to London. It is certainly something of a mystery, but not a carefully unified whole.

The Figure in the Carpet – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Figure in the Carpet – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Figure in the Carpet – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Figure in the Carpet – Penguin Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Figure in the Carpet – Penguin Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle eBook edition

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Figure in the Carpet – audio book

The Figure in the Carpet – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Figure in the Carpet – plot summary

An un-named literary critic feels he has successfully reviewed the latest work of Hugh Vereker, a distinguished novelist. But when he meets the author in person at a social event, Vereker tells him that whilst the review is intelligent, he has missed the hidden underlying issue which informs all of his writing. The narrator presses him to reveal the nature of this mystery, but Vereker refuses, claiming that it will be self-evident in any close reading of his work.

The narrator enlists the support of his friend, the writer George Corvick, in the search for this hidden key. The hunt also entails novelist Gwendolen Erme, to whom Corvick is engaged but whose mother is opposed to the match. None of them succeeds in uncovering the secret pattern, but when Corvick goes to India with a commission for journalistic work, he writes back to announce that he has discovered the secret.

When pressed for information, he says he will only reveal the secret after he has married Gwendolen. He then visits Vereker in Italy on his way back to London, and we are given every reason to believe that Vereker confirms Corvick’s solution to the mystery. Corvick then begins to write the definitive interpretation of Vereker’s works.

Gwendolen’s mother dies, and Corvick’s wedding takes place, but he is killed in an accident on his honeymoon. When the narrator appeals to his widow for the key to the mystery, she refuses to divulge anything. It transpires that Corvick’s study of Vereker’s work is no more than a few introductory pages which reveal nothing.

The narrator is so sure that Corvick will have revealed the secret to Gwendolen that he contemplates marrying her to get at the information, but she meanwhile publishes another book and marries fellow novelist Drayton Deane, who the narrator perceives as a literary and social rival. But Gwendolen then dies in childbirth, leaving the narrator to appeal to Drayton Deane, asking if she has passed on to him the key to the mystery. She has not, and they are both left to contemplate the fact that they will never find it.

Principal characters

I	the un-named narrator, who is a literary critic
George Corvick	his friend, an author
Gwendolen Erme	a novelist, ‘engaged’ to Corvick
Lady Jane	a society hostess
Bridges	her country house
Hugh Vereker	a distinguished author
*The Middle*	a literary magazine
Drayton Deane	a novelist who marries Gwendolen

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

Washington Square (1880) is a superb early short novel, It’s the tale of a young girl whose future happiness is being controlled by her strict authoritarian (but rather witty) father. She is rather reserved, but has a handsome young suitor. However, her father disapproves of him, seeing him as an opportunist and a fortune hunter. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant New York town house. Who wins out in the end? You will probably be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, offering a sensitive picture of a young woman’s life.
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The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

&copy Roy Johnson 2012

More tales by James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Friends of the Friends

January 3, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Friends of the Friends (1896) is one of the many variations of ‘a ghost story’ that James wrote in his late period. It was originally entitled The Way it Came for its first appearance in the May issue of Chapman’s Magazine of Fiction then renamed when published in the New York Edition of James’s novels and tales which appeared in 1907-1909. Neither title seems to really summarise or capture the story in a satisfactory manner.

The Friends of the Friends – critical commentary

The ghostly reading

Those with a penchant for supernatural interpretations have sufficient evidence here to provide a coherent reading of the tale. This rests on the notion that some people have the capacity to conjure up an apparition of a person who is in fact dying in a different location. It happens to the man in the story, who was ‘visited’ by his mother in Oxford around the same time that she is dying in Wales.

If we take that as a credible possibility, then the idea that he ‘sees’ his fellow clairvoyant late at night when she appears in his rooms is merely another example of the same phenomenon. After all, she appears, then disappears. They do not speak to each other.

The female inner-narrator guesses – it would seem correctly – that he has been deeply touched by the experience, and bases her subsequent rejection of him on this curiously supernatural infidelity, especially as he subsequently admits to its continuing.

But this interpretation rests on believing the inner-narrator’s interpretation of events. She believes that the woman was dead at that time. But the man does not. He claims it was a visit from the woman herself, fully alive. He is even able to describer her appearance (the three feathers in her hat).

It’s also possible to see the supernatural events from another perspective – that of the ghosts’ point of view. The female inner-narrator sees the man’s mother and her woman friend as sharing a capacity to make appearances before the man: “a strange gift shared by her with his mother and on her side likewise hereditary”. This interpretation puts the supernatural capacity onto the dying figure, rather than the person to whom they appear.

The unreliable narrator

Interpretation of the story may come down to which account of events seems more plausible – that of the man or the female inner-narrator. It is quite feasible that the woman called to see him whilst she was still alive – though it seems rather unlikely that two people would meet under such circumstances without speaking to each other.

On the other hand, if we accept that the two ‘visitations’ by the dying parents are credible, then the inner-narrator’s claim that the man had seen and communed seriously with the woman’s ghost at the same time as she was dying has the force of logic to it. If he can see one ghost, why not another? Or as the inner-narrator sees it, her woman friend shares a hereditary capacity for ghostliness with the man’s mother.

But another element which should be taken into account is that the inner-narrator can be seen as one of James’s many emotionally unstable and possibly unreliable narrators who he created around this time. She can certainly be seen as a precursor of the governess in The Turn of the Screw. She is predisposed to jealousy even before her two friends meet each other; she manipulates and deceives both of them; she accuses her fiancé of a very peculiar form of infidelity, and of course she does not name either of them or herself in her written account of events.

The narrative frame

The one-sided frame of the narrative is cast in the form of a letter or memo, written by the outer narrator to a publisher, who has asked him to look through the papers of a woman who has died. This is another example of a James tale which begins with the death of its protagonist. The story is in fact a retrospective, and we tend to forget whilst reading that the principal character no longer exists in the fictional time frame.

In fact the term ‘framed narrative’ is slightly misleading in such cases. In its original sense it was used to describe stories which were given some sort of introduction and conclusion. The story itself was therefore a fiction within a fiction.

For example, Joseph Conrad’s famous novella Heart of Darkness begins and ends with a group of sailors talking on board a ship, waiting for the tide to turn. One of them, Marlow, recounts his experiences which constitute the main events of story. But the introductory passages set the scene, and the conclusion returns to the same point, on board the ship, thereby completing the frame. It is worth noting that Conrad, like James, uses an un-named outer-narrator to introduce Marlow as the inner-narrator.

One remarkable feature of this story is that none of the characters in it is given a name. It’s true that there are only three principal characters – the inner narrator, plus her woman and man friend, but as the outer-narrator comments, they are given ‘neither name nor initials’.

The Friend of the Friends – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Friends of the Friends – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Friends of the Friends – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Friends of the Friends – Vintage Classics edition

The Ghost Stories of Henry James – Wordsworth edition

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Friends of the Friends – read the book on line

The Friends of the Friends – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Friends of the Friends – plot summary

A woman has two friends (a man and a woman) who both have the same supernatural experience of witnessing the appearance of a parent who at the very same moment is dying in another location. The woman thinks that they would like to meet each other so as to compare their experiences. However, both of them prevaricate over making the necessary arrangements.

The initial woman eventually becomes engaged to the man, and sets up a rendezvous between her two friends. But when she learns that the other woman’s husband has suddenly died she has a jealous fear that their common experience might draw them close to each other. She sends a message delaying the meeting with her fiancé until dinner later the same day.

The second woman visits the first in the afternoon as planned, and predicts that she will never meet the man, even at the forthcoming wedding. When she has gone, the man visits for dinner and the woman guiltily confesses her deception, then promises to do the same for her friend.

Next day she goes to Richmond, only to discover that her friend is dead. She goes back to report this to the man, who reveals that the woman visited him after he got back from dinner the night before. He claims that they never spoke, but he was very struck by her presence.

He cannot produce any concrete evidence that this visit took place, so the woman tries to convince him that he has seen a ghost – as he did when he witnessed the apparition of his mother. He tries to reassure her, but she feels jealous of the affect her friend has had on him.

The other woman is buried, but as the date of the marriage approaches the first woman feels that the friend has come between them, and eventually accuses her fiancé of ‘seeing’ her privately every evening, something he is unable to deny. So she calls off the marriage and they separate. Six years later he dies, and because his demise is sudden and inexplicable, she feels that he has gone in a ‘response to an irresistible call’.

Principal characters

I	an un-named outer narrator who presents the written story
I	an un-named inner female narrator who has written the story
—	her pretty un-named woman friend, whose husband dies
—	her un-named male friend, to whom she becomes engaged

Henry James’s study

Ghost stories by Henry James

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

The Private Life (1892)

Owen Wingrave (1892)

The Friends of the Friends (1896)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

The Real Right Thing (1899)

The Third Person (1900)

The Jolly Corner (1908)